THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,626) Mark Eric — “Don’t Cry Over Me”
Brian Wilson’s greatest lost album is actually . . . Mark Eric Malmborg’s A Midsummer’s Day Dream (see #326, 948)! It is “one of the lost slices of pop perfection from late 60’s Southern California” (Bill Wikstrom, http://talkaboutpoppopmusic.blogspot.com/2009/10/mark-eric-midsummers-day-dream.html), a “beautiful album” that “catch[es] the tail end of LA’s pop innocence perfectly, just as it was gone forever”. (https://www.lpcdreissues.com/item/a-midsummer-s-day) I don’t know whether Brian ever heard today’s song from the LP, but if he did, I am sure he would have felt proud. In any event, it serves as a touching tribute.
Bad Cat goes on about the album:
[The LP is] probably the best Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys album they never released. . . . Interestingly, Eric and his collaborator/arranger former Animals guitarist Vic Briggs apparently wrote these twelve tracks as demos intending to place them with other acts. . . . but the results were so impressive that Revue decided to release it as a Marc Eric effort. Musically the album was already several years out of step with popular tastes so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see the parent LP and singles vanish directly into cutout bins.
As does Larry:
Mark Eric’s music has been described – accurately – as some of the best Beach Boys material not actually created by Mr Wilson and his henchmen. . . . [H]e seems to have internalized the post-Pet Sounds vibe, mixing it with a healthy dose of Sunshine Pop. . . . I’m always amazed that someone was able/willing to pull something like this off in 1969. There were certainly legions of Brian Wilson fanboys appropriating his sound (ironically or not) in the 80s and 90s, but for someone to dig this deep into that sound, and pull it off so well while the Beach Boys prime was still in the ether (as it were) was remarkable. . . . [R]ecord store basements of the world are packed floor to ceiling with 45s by acts that were dead set on imitating the Beach Boys, Beatles, Byrds, Rolling Stones and others, most of whom made a hash of it. To hear an entire album so well done, in regard to songcraft, arranging and performing, yet so obviously derivative is a remarkable and rare thing.
https://ironleg.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/the-california-sunshine-of-mark-eric/
About Mark Eric, Bryan Thomas tells us:
L.A. native Mark Eric was leading the Southern California dream life in his teens — surfing by day and writing songs about girls by night — before his musical talents drew him to Hollywood. He was 16 when he met Russ Regan, then at Warner Bros., but his first break came while waiting in the lobby of label honcho Lou Sadler’s office. There he met Bob Raucher, an engineer at local KHJ radio station . . . . Raucher took a liking to the suntanned surfer/songwriter, and, under his “personal management,” Eric was soon recording at Gold Star studios in Hollywood. One of his songs was later recorded by the Four Freshmen . . . . Subsequent sessions by Eric, backed with studio musicians, led to another meeting with Regan, now heading up UNI . . , who signed the promising soft pop singer to the label. Eric only recorded one album . . . which was released in 1969 on UNI’s R&B subsidiary, Revue Records. . . . One of [Erik’s] songs, “Fly Me a Place for the Summer,” was later recorded by the Mike Curb Congregation [see #57] for an airline commercial. . . .
Eric’s charming, somewhat imperfect falsetto (in a somewhat obvious homage to Brian Wilson) hints at a subterranean layer of loneliness throughout. His self-penned, broken-hearted Beach Boys-style ballads . . . are, in fact, the perfect vehicle for his faltering upper-register voice.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/mark-eric-mn0000273359, https://www.allmusic.com/album/a-midsummers-day-dream-mw0000663846
Here is Mark Eric’s Brian Wilson moment:
A childhood friend afforded Mark the opportunity to meet the Beach Boys first hand by taking him to a taping of the Andy Williams Show. . . .
[Mark:] “One of the neatest things was Brian was busy writing a song, and the only thing I heard was, ‘We met when she was younger,” and he and Al were going over the parts, and he said, ‘Al, sing it like this.’ He was really playing furiously with his bass writing the song in his head. This was during the rehearsal and he was writing on the spot in front of everyone! And then other fragments of the song would start to appear. A couple months later, ‘Little Girl I Once Knew’ was being played on the radio.”
Steve Stanley, liner notes to the CD reissue of A Midsummer’s Day Dream
Oh, and Black Cat informs us that “Eric subsequently turned his time and attention to modeling, commercials and acting, briefly appearing in a number of early-1970s television shows including The Partridge Family and Hawaii 5-0.” (http://badcatrecords.com/ERICmark.htm)
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